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pauldes

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web farm hardware requirements

I have a web application that uses a single IIS web site. I want to provide an environment that will allow for growth yet not be overkill. What I want to do/host in my web app and my basic specs, are as follows:

IIS web application deployed in a web farm
SQL 2K5 server deployed in some sort of clustered or fail over environment
The database server will hold up to 500 database that are likely not to exceed 100MG in size

Basically, I'm confused on the wide variety of processors I can get in a dedicated server and the wide range of cost. Singles, duals, single/multicore, dual multicore, etc.  I want my application to be very responsive, but at max there are likely never going to be more than 2000 individual users and not all using it at the same time.

Other questions......
Do I need load balancing?
software firewall or go to the extra cost for hardware?
How much RAM? I currently have all the application on a single dual xeon box with 4GB of ram and it works quite well. Do I get lower RAM or CPU on the web server and higher on the SQL box?

Anyway, those are my general questions on the subject.
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arkopolo

Most server come with a dual nic, that can be use as a team to increace
                     Adapter Fault Tolerance
·      Adaptive Load Balancing
·      Static Link Aggregation
·      IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic Link Aggregation
·      Switch Fault Tolerance
a few options..  the second part to that is a switch that will handle that.
you can always put another 2 nics which will give you 4 in total.
Firewall go with hardware cisco is the way to go.
Most of the Dual CPU will be sufficient for this to work well.

4 gig is a lot of memory, you will not be able to get more since you it's dependent on the OS you are going to run.  win server 2003 r2, win sbs 2003 standard will only give you 3.4 gig windows does not see the whole 4 gig of memory. if you go to win server 2003 enterprise will allow more memory but does it justify the cost?

Then have a look at the storage and backup which is very importent.
How much processing is actually done on the web site vs. the backend database?  Is the fron-end primarily just display of data from the database or is there actual work going on as well?

Dave Dietz
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ASKER

There is a bit of work, but it's primarily a database driven web site. All pages, components, etc are data driven
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Dave_Dietz
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